There's no question that Ian McCarthy shot and killed Clinton, Missouri, police officer Gary Lee Michael Jr. And in the minds of many Americans, that means there's no question that McCarthy deserves a state execution.

But that's not what the jury that convicted McCarthy of murder determined; it couldn't agree on a sentence. So now it's up to one judge — one — to decide whether he lives or dies.

Missouri is one of just two states in the nation (Indiana is the other) that allows a judge to unilaterally impose a death sentence when a jury hasn't. It's a construct that critics argue violates both the Sixth Amendment's right to a trial by jury and the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Whatever Missourians think about capital punishment generally, the specter of a single individual imposing the ultimate penalty when a jury has declined to should be deeply troubling. The judge in this case should heed the jury's hesitation and impose a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. And the Missouri Legislature should, finally, change the law so that a jury of one's peers, and not one judge, makes the final decision in future cases.

This page has long argued that the death penalty is a brutal anachronism from a dark era; that uneven application of it by race and class is inevitable; that the many DNA exonerations of death-row inmates indicates beyond any rational doubt that innocent people have been executed; that there's no reliable data indicating it has any deterrent effect on murders; and that it lowers America in the eyes of the advanced world, which has almost entirely ended the practice.

None of these arguments rely on sympathy for murderers, and McCarthy deserves none.

On Aug. 6, 2017, McCarthy killed Michael with a high-powered rifle after Michael pulled him over in Clinton, southeast of Kansas City. A Jackson County jury in June of this year found McCarthy guilty of murder. After deliberating on the sentence, the jury told Judge Marco Roldan it couldn't reach a unanimous verdict on whether to impose a death sentence.

In most of America, that would have automatically meant a sentence of life in prison. But Missouri's unusual system allows the judge to decide whether to do what the jury declined to, and sentence the defendant to death.

Roldan will hold a sentencing hearing Friday.

The U.S. Supreme Court, striking down part of a Florida law in 2016, ruled that the "Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death."

But the Missouri Supreme Court has ruled in previous cases that as long as a jury finds (as McCarthy's jury did) that the facts make the defendant eligible for the death penalty, then the judge can impose that sentence even if the jury doesn't.

Should that level of legal hair-splitting really determine whether the state kills someone?

McCarthy's lawyers have filed a motion claiming Missouri's statute allowing a judge-imposed death sentence is unconstitutional based on the Eighth Amendment's "cruel and unusual punishment" standard. A ruling by the judge confirming that argument could start the process of finally reforming this problematic law via the courts, if the Legislature won't do it.

As for the question of whether McCarthy should be put to death: A jury of his peers has spoken p— or, rather, failed to. That should be the end of it.

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